I’ve heard from several of you that use Excel to manage large sets of data nad I know hata few of you must then get different metrics from that data depending on specific conditions. I’ve already covered Sumif quite a bit so today I thought I’d get into “averageif”. Let’s start with a large set of data:

This is an example of the top rankings in the WTA tennis tour. One typical thing that you could end up wanting to do is find information such as:

-What is the average # of tournaments that the top Russians have played compared with the top Americans. Here is How I would do it:

“IF the Transaction is a ‘delete’, AND the Rate Category is selected, THEN match the delete rate from the corresponding Rate Category List into the Rate cell, IF the Transaction is an ‘add’, AND the Rate Category is selected, THEN match the add rate from the corresponding Rate Category List into the Rate cell.”

Again, it’s about trying to go step by step. the first case here is:

IF the Transaction is a ‘delete’, AND the Rate Category is selected, THEN match the delete rate from the corresponding Rate Category List into the Rate cell

So here, I’d need an “if and” condition that will check the value of the first column, look if cell 2 is empty and if both conditions are met, do a vlookup to find the correct rate. Simple? Here is what I came up with:

=IF(AND(A13=”Deletion”,B13<>“”),VLOOKUP(B13,RSUI_Deletes,2,FALSE),””)

The second part is:

IF the Transaction is an ‘add’, AND the Rate Category is selected, THEN match the add rate from the corresponding Rate Category List into the Rate cell.

Today, a reader sent me a list of 400 addresses that were all entered in a format like this one:

P.S: I am not publishing the actual file for privacy purposes and don’t feel like writing down 400 fake ones:)

Her hope was to transform the addresses into what you’d use on a label such as:

I thought this would be a good VBA practice. So what I wanted to do was use a “loop” function to go through each line and for each one, write down the label over 4 lines. How did I manage? Here is the code I used:

Last week, after publishing my most recent post about Google spreadsheet, I received 5 emails within a few hours from readers that are increasingly using Google docs. I asked them why? Not surprisingly, they said it was mostly the ability to have multiple users at once as well as the free cost. For years, the main drawbacks for Google spreadsheets (when comparing with Excel) has been the lack of advanced functions, macros, etc.

Things Are Changing Quickly

Over the past few months, I’ve published posts about getting financial data into the spreadsheets through the Google finance function, one of many “custom” functions.

Then last week I discussed the use of scripts to build “vba-like” functions

Today, I wanted to discuss some of the changes in the new version of Google spreadsheets that is being rolled out:

-Offline working: This is GREAT. Yes, I love working online and will always do so when possible. But the ability to work on my docs when offline is a major benefit. Yes, you need to use Chrome as your browser but that is what I always use anyway.
-Improved Formula Editing: This makes it easier to work with functions in a similar way to what Excel offers
-New Functions: They added functions such as “Sumif”, “Countif”, “AverageIf”… ring any bells?
-Filter views: I will need to experiment with this but it does look promising

Many other things were improved/upgraded and added.

Clearly, Google Spreadsheets always was an alternative to Excel but as time goes by, it’s clearer that the spreadsheets are quickly catching up to MS Excel. It’s still lacking many different functions but the gap is shrinking.

If you are not yet using Google Docs, I’d love to hear why, and if you are, could you imagine moving away from Excel at some point? I’m far from that point but I would say that I spend as much time in Google spreadsheets as I do in Excel now…!